Lithonia

‘Once upon a time’ loses its meaning when you’re suspended as time moves around you, when you can turn the hands of the clock backwards and believe the sins you’ve committed are changed, when the hands break off and the face stares blankly ahead.

“Once upon a tick, a tock, a tick and a tock that never came…” mumbled unorthodoxly glossed lips, which really were not so out of the ordinary. Warm, faintly chemical-scented breaths flowed out of a mouth that had been called both beautiful and filthy in the past twenty-four hours; air from the room flowed in – some left over confusion probably entering too – drying the saliva in and around that which was sleepy, filthy, beautiful.

Moments that had potentiality never passed to finality. Hazel eyes saw conclusions as limitations and chose to ask questions in the now, but only ever of others. Pale palms still held learnt ambitions and taut hopes that never changed from blue, never reached the seventh day.

Caught in the sixth – having just been birthed by a being who was something from nothing and therefore, in a non sequitur, nothing in Itself, crushing the hearts and minds of a thousand illogical believers – were, amongst an ineffable amount of others, an ineffable amount of cells with twenty-three chromosome pairs, stubborn alleles twisted to make eyes dark, almost-black brown, hair deep chestnut, and complexion pale but Asian. In easier, but not necessarily more comfortable terms, on the laminated wood floor of a sparsely furnished apartment lay a boy in whose mind reality and imagination were merged and mated, his stream of consciousness like the sinful exchange of saliva in a kiss between members of rival triads in some hideaway Hong Kong coffee shop. But this was Tokyo, where imagination impregnates the chaste and, thanks to Sora’s many weaknesses, every glass of water’s like six shots of Everclear.



The clock had stopped. The alarm never rang. It seemed like it could have stayed twenty-four minutes and thirty-seven seconds past six forever. Had Sora been awake to see the stationary hands, he probably would have wished something similar, just for a change – or rather, an end to changes. The mechanical clock might have been out of place in the otherwise modernised apartment, but the constant clicking of the mechanism reminded Sora that he was still alive, and it seemed that such a thing was only really needed in modern society; did the ancients ever walk around in dissociative fugues? The state that Sora was in, it was almost ironic that his reminder had ended.

Oxygen in, carbon dioxide and water out – that’s the combination that keeps us alive. Carbon dioxide and fermented sugars in and…well, you ended up like Sora – in one way or another. Living, breathing one-fifty-three proof of the ill effects of giving in to the things your mind tells you to drink.

Outside the room, just within the average person’s peripheral vision, two butterflies danced about each other, flitting and flirting and silently admiring each other’s colours. Unsuspecting and delicate, they spiralled and made believe, though who knows what about.

Instead of a bell at half past seven, there was an off-kilter-rhythmed knock on the door at five minutes to noon. A flicker of eyelashes, a slow slow revelation and a hindered realisation; eyes saw white all around for a few seconds and Sora shivered, the clinical atmosphere reminding him horribly of hospitals and – in all its purity – death. Tiles came into view first, though his mind decided they ought to be cracked and bleeding viscous lucent aqua fluids. The blue was breathtakingly cold on contact, and as Sora gasped his mouth was filled with the scent and, subsequently, taste of vomit. A hand moved up to cover shiny, sticky lips and a thick swallow ensued.

After a handful of those moments that seem like ten times their actual duration, Sora realised he was lying on his bathroom floor. Two half-empty bottles were noted – one of alcohol and one of sleeping pills – along with some coloured translucent capsules that were a similar shade to the fluid that continued to ebb from the cracks in the off-white porcelain.

A sigh and a groan and another sigh as he pulled himself up onto his knees and splashed his face with water from the cold tap. Sora hung on to the edge of the washbasin as he stared down at the floor and saw that the coloured liquid and capsules had vanished from the now healed tiles. The fluid, in a more azure shade, appeared on his fingertips, though it had not left a mark before. Blue spread down his out-stretched fingers towards his palm as he moved them closer to his face. A curious tongue discovered that the thick liquid was both sickeningly saline and saccharin, causing him to retch as the cold slid down his throat.

Sora sat tense, back pressed up against the side of the bath, and felt the chill creep down the inside of his chest. There was this sensation and nothing else, until he noticed the knocking on the door. He gasped and suddenly awoke; all the blue had disappeared and, in fact, the room glowed orange-yellow with the midday sun.

The words were scratchy, in his mind and in this throat. “It’s open,” he shouted lethargically, knowing that he probably had not bothered to lock the door and that it could only really be one person.

A voice that reminded him of sunshine and cities and escaping called back. “Hey, sleepy-head. You just wake up?” Tsukasa knew Sora’s moods, voice and body language so well that he had known his assumption was right, so well that when the other boy dragged himself into the lounge he knew just from the stance what he’d done and how much he regretted it. “Oh, Sora…not again.”

Running a hand through his bleached blond hair, Sora leaned against the doorframe and gazed at the blurred figure who had just shut the door behind himself. He sighed and groaned again and, after wandering a few feet, collapsed on the sofa. “I think my sorrows have evolved gills,” cryptic words mumbled as he still tried to make everything come into focus, “or maybe they are anaerobic.”

Cryptic words were met with an understanding smile from Tsukasa as he sat next to the blond. His hands were folded in his lap with formality and lack of intimacy that was strange for him. “Or maybe they feed on your struggling to breathe polluted air.”

A hand found itself entwined in almost black hair, and Sora found himself nuzzling Tsukasa’s shoulder. “Better poisoned air than a lung full of water,” he murmured, placing a soft kiss on the other’s jaw. His sight was certainly clearer now, even if his speech wasn’t.

Tsukasa turned his head away from Sora, smelling the alcohol that he knew there would be on his breath. “A system full of Everclear and a mind devoid of memories is better?” He couldn’t bear to look at him, let alone look him in the eyes.

The blond shuddered at the other boy’s utterance of the name of the suicide liquor, the burning and dry mouth sensation that he instinctively associated with it seeming very out of place being connected with such a person. Sora’s hand slid away from Tsukasa to unconsciously mirror his position by resting in it his own lap, via a forlorn brush down the soft fabric of the fleece the other was wearing. He moved to be kneeling in front of him, staring up into familiar deep brown eyes. He sighed yet again and bowed his head. “I already have a mind devoid of sanity. Let's see just how empty I can get before I break.”

Eyes narrowed; brows furrowed. He hated to see Sora hurting himself like this. He hated to see that Sora did not realize how much he was hurting other people. He stood before the boy, staring down sullenly, shaking his head in dismay and disappointment. “You're already broken, Sora.”

The moroseness was met with a gaze needy and doleful. “So why the hell doesn't anyone try to fix me?” His gaze continued when he heard no answer. He stood up with a clumsiness that suggested he didn’t know how to use his own body, and his half-despondent, half-manic stare would have made anyone divert their eyes. “Or is this how you like it, Tsukasa,” he began, his voice as shaky as he was, “me the little, weak, weeping damsel in distress, you my big, strong, strapping knight in shining armour?”

Sora was gradually becoming hysterical. He knew very well that it would have little effect on the other’s continuously peaceful disposition, but he wasn’t doing it to achieve anything. “You want to save me, Tsukasa? Come and save me.” He held his arms out wide, either offering himself or signalling that he was being completely open, possibly both, with his state of mind.

“Or if you're just trying to get in my pants, then have your way with me and get the hell out of my apartment.”

Tsukasa looked him up and down blankly, then walked away. “Lithonia,” he said clearly and articulately, despite half the sounds being alien to him as Japanese was his mother tongue.

The beautiful, foreign-sounding word caught Sora’s attention and he turned to look at the boy who was standing a few metres away. “What are you talking about?”

“Lithonia,” he repeated with more emotion this time, the beauty overpowering the difficulty. “It's a word someone invented. It means ‘love for something that's broken, not whole, faulty, useless–’”

“That's what this is to you? That what I am to you?” Sora exclaimed. “That’s why you don’t want me healed, because you love the way I’m broken?” he demanded, walking purposefully across to Tsukasa and standing so close that their noses almost touched, that the brunette could taste his sleepy, chemical breath, that when he leaned forward as he spoke his lips brushed the other’s.

“Tell me, koibito, what exactly is it that you love – the way my mouth tastes when I’m half-dead and vomiting after I’ve overdosed, or running your fingers over my tingling, bleeding, gaping wounds while I still hold the scalpel in my hand, or is it the longer-term effects, seeing me slowly deteriorating, disintegrating, weakening so that you can dominate me, and mother me, and touch me in any way you like?”

Tsukasa took a deep, calm breath in, realising just how much he’d miss the lunacy and the almost nonsense conversations and the hysteria and even the paranoia if he didn’t get to see it in this bittersweetly beautiful form. “I love you, Sora.” He slid his arms around the boy’s slim waist and kissed him softly. “But I hate to see you hurting yourself,” he whispered, their closeness overcoming any necessity for the words to be more than breaths.

Sora made some weak noise of agreement and embraced him. “It’s just so difficult to will my heart to keep beating when it looks like everything around me is bleeding my own blood.” Right at that very moment, in fact, the walls seemed to be being stained with a deep purple that seeped upwards from the floor. It was about two-thirds of the way up, and it felt like it was calling, getting louder as it permeated the walls’ original pale blue shade.

As the calm was tinted, tainted by this colour of insanity, the rich, silent voice that it cried out with seemed to be – without words – making sentences, making prayers and curses and invective that seemed to draw Sora closer. He stepped away from Tsukasa as if in a trance, lured by the deep colours and fierce words. When his fingertips touched the amethyst liquid it burnt like the strongest acid; he cried out in pain and jumped backwards.

“What are you doing?” Tsukasa gasped as he ran over and dropped to the ground beside the quivering boy. “What’s wrong?”

Shaking, but feeling vaguely safe within the other’s arms, Sora stared at his hands as they stung horrifically, like an acid was dissolving his skin. He nearly screamed, yet somehow he managed to swallow the pained noises and answer as he looked apologetically up at the brunette. “I still see those things, Kasa,” he murmured. “I feel them too. I don’t know what it is but it hurts, Kasa. It hurts inside my head and I want it to go away.”

The murmurs, to him, sounded like a child; Sora needed mothering much more than he might have liked to believe he did. Tsukasa stroked his hair comfortingly as he took in what Sora had told him. “I thought you said they went away.”

Sora nuzzled the other boy’s shoulder again. “I lied. I saw how much it was hurting you. I couldn’t go on telling you about it and watching you try not to cry or to show how disappointed you are. I’m sorry. I was trying to save you from being hurt.” He slowly got to his feet, looking down at Tsukasa. “Wait here a second,” he muttered before wandering off into another room. A minute later he returned with a pot of black paint and a paintbrush. He approached the word-less rich purple, which was still silently exclaiming its painful confusion, and swirled the brush about in the paint. Reaching up, he began to write his own simple message back.

One elegantly, insanely slow brushstroke along the top, then three long-drawn-out flicks beneath it, the black dripping down and calming the purple, like alkali on acid, though both were corroding his control. A short line down and then one horizontally that was so long Sora almost didn’t know when to finish it. The cries sounded almost as though they were being comforted as he put all of what little energy he had into painting this lone symbol; the amethyst became a strong shade of lilac as he continued.

Tsukasa stood, staring bemusedly as the boy ran the brush over the wall. He gradually realised what he was writing, and that knowledge was all that prevented him from rushing over to try to make him snap out of it. He watched as the blond added the last stroke to the kanji, the brush running down the remainder of the wall and then dropping to the floorboards as Sora relinquished his grasp and also fell to the floor, seemingly exhausted, with a deep and final-sounding sigh. Tsukasa ran over and cradled the boy in his arms – as he was wont to do after these ‘episodes’ – whispering and murmuring calm and sweet words while stroking the mess of blond hair.

Bare, scarred, frail arms wrapped themselves around the torso of the one whose body could accept the warmth as the other pulled himself up onto the brunette’s lap and buried his face in the soft fleece. “I wish it was as simple as that, as covering the demons black and blocking their pores and throats with sapid, half-devoured darkness, but eyes that score through flesh can fast far past the refracted stream of consciousness that a bruised soul emits through torn hypodermic entry holes where the mirrors twist to fit your dreams.” A sharp breath – in – of reality and disappointment at how tactilely existent the things he could see around him were.

Lips softly met a vaguely clammy forehead in a confused attempt at comfort. Everything that came into Tsukasa’s head sounded patronising, so he stayed silent and stared at the striking symbol on the wall. He could still discern the word despite the many drips and trails of black that there were down the pale blue.

Eventually, he began a faltered reply. “In truth, those razor-edged stares never even–”

“No, not their stares,” Sora corrected him, awkwardly shuffling round to look at Tsukasa properly, “but their eyes. The blood red irises and the pinhole into nothingness, the dot of dark, vitreous purity, of dark, dilated seduction, that is the wickedness which burns and scrapes, Kasa, through and through to my empty core.” He slowly leaned forwards until again he was so close that he could feel Tsukasa breathing. “They never close their eyes. They never sleep, and they never let me sleep. There is only one way I can escape them, only one route that enables me to close my eyes for eternity.”

Tsukasa gasped and turned away, his hand covering his mouth – suppressing whimpers and words – as he looked from the symbol on the wall to the blond knelt in front of him.

Sora’s fingers curled around the hand which was trying to shield him from the things Tsukasa wished he didn’t want to say. “Talk, Kasa. Please,” he murmured.

“Love?” he questioned vaguely as he stared at the kanji on the wall. “You wrote ‘love’, but I don’t think you understand what it really means.” Tsukasa stood up slowly and calmly, and looked down at Sora. “I love you, so I can’t stay here and watch you fall apart.” He wiped away a single tear that was creeping down his face.

Ashamed of what he was about to say, Tsukasa turned away from the blond. “I don’t know what to do anymore,” he whispered, his voice shaking, “but I can’t do this anymore.”

Sora stared up in disbelief, shivering, touched by the coldest of ice; every tear and every drop of sweat that had ever graced his skin had frozen in this delayed morn to form an aimless, endless rime.

Is there anyone who hasn’t ever admired the beauty of a first frost without considering that it signals the beginning of the end?

The quivering blond wished frozen dew drops were his only problem, rather than it seeming as though everything around him was freezing and shaking and crashing down. “N-no,” he breathed, “it...it never wavers. It can’t. It was real.”

Tsukasa shook his head. “It was too real.”

And that’s why everything comes falling to the ground? That's why the clouds can't stay in the sky and this is why we don't have the wings to reach them?

“If it’s too real, why make it so painful?” Sora half-screamed as he finally broke down. “You can’t deal with the fact that I can’t cope when you are here... Don’t you realise how badly I’m going to lose control if you leave, Kasa? Or is it a case of out of sight, out of mind?”

“I can’t properly love someone who doesn’t know who they are half the time, who doesn’t know where they are, who can’t tell what’s real from what’s not. I’m never sure of what you believe and what you don’t, whether you can tell my voice apart from the ones in your head.” Tsukasa turned and slowly started walking towards the door.

“Wait! Please stop, Kasa!” Words pleaded from a throat that was now awake, from a mind that was now far from being so. Hands that thought they were awake reached out towards the other boy as the blond scrabbled inelegantly to his feet and ran over to Tsukasa, grabbing his arms to keep him from walking away. “Kasa, I know you’re real. I know you’re here.” A kind hand rested on a soft cheek and lips met in an uncharacteristically chaste kiss.

“But, Sora, how do I know you’re here?” His hand slid into artificially lightened hair – which he had always loved for accentuating the other’s almost-night-black eyes – while a tear was wiped away by one that was its mirror image, save for a tattoo around his right wrist and a ring on his left hand which signified something that was self-explanatory though far from simple. “How do I know that in your mind, on an unconscious level that you cannot control, this is interpreted as more than just a dream, or a nightmare? You might remember none of this. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before.” Eyes flicked penitently down as he took three meek steps away.

Sora buried his face in his hands – anything to block out what was supposed to be real or fake or something in between – then slowly looked up, dark eyes gazing over bitten-to-the-quick nails. A hidden insane grin appeared on his lips. Just as Tsukasa noticed that the blond's eyes seemed to be smiling and looking straight through him, Sora quickly turned and grabbed the burgundy-stained knife that was lying on the ground, presumably where he had dropped it the night before. Pressing it into his arm without actually daring to break the skin, he looked up at Tsukasa – who was staring wide-eyed, taken by surprise at the fast actions – and then back down at his arms, the hysterical smile still his unchanging facial expression. “I'll make it more than just a dream, Kasa.”

Shocked, he ran over and held Sora's wrists, desperately trying to uncurl the blond's hand from around the handle. “What the hell do you think you're doing?” he shouted as he managed to separate Sora's arms, getting the blade away from already scarred flesh, though not without a struggle: two drops of blood trickled down arms that were struggling to be freed.

“You want me to remember this? This is the only way I know to make everything around me seem like more than just a nightmare.” A grimace of effort and concentration crept onto his face as he fought against Tsukasa. “If you loved me, you'd let me do this.”

“If I loved you, I would not sit back and let you bleed!” he shouted as he managed to free the knife from Sora's hand and throw it a few metres away from them.

Sora chased after the blade and fell to the floor only a few seconds after it did, grabbing it and dragging it across his arm with a weak moan and then a sigh of relief.

Tsukasa watched the pathetic display without even considering rushing over to stop him: it just wasn't worth it anymore. “If I stay with you any longer, I'm going to end up as crazy as you are,” he said, before turning and walking out the door, closing it silently with a strange calm that now overwhelmed him.

Oxygen in, carbon dioxide out – and droplets and rivers and deep dark oceans of saline water that were racing each other over cheekbones to the down-turned corner of quivering lips. Which one can burn you the most, the quickest, the deepest? Behind the door, beyond tightly closed eyes, was the boy without whom the other felt he would turn to ashes at the first drip – tick –…and…drop – tock – of rain, irritatingly unpredictable as it could be at times, the entirely make-believe passage of seconds, the falling of stars.

He shivered. It’s a chance I’m willing to take.

Sora’s index finger rested on the blunter side of the knife’s blade, as a surgeon’s might upon a scalpel in a life-saving operation as he opens up some poor child’s torso in an attempt to change part of the way his God made him – seeing the tiny heart beating away desperately – as a surgeon’s might upon a scalpel in a post-mortem examination as he opens up some poor child’s torso in an attempt to find out where it all went wrong – seeing the tiny heart rotting away unnoticeably – great familiarity with the cutting tool causing him to unconsciously hold in the way that would get the best view of everything inside.

Tsukasa’s hand lingered still on the door handle, though whether it was because he wanted to turn it again and return to the warmth or simply because he could not move he wasn’t sure. The corridor looked as though the sky had fallen, clear blues and grey-ish whites and blinding lights, but most of all the burning sensation that was rushing all along his skin, eating through to whatever was strong enough to live in the dark that there was beneath the mask, behind the façade.

Why do I want to do this? He stared at his hand, at how illogical it was to fall into this, because he knew it’d hurt, sooner or later. He imagined the look that there would be in the other boy’s tearful eyes when he went back to what he knew made him feel safe, even if it actually made him far less so.

A shaky breath of calm air – in.

I feel so lost. All it would have taken was a glance up from the fated, fatal hand to recognise his surroundings, but some of us are addicted to staring at what horrifies us. It’s amazing what can happen when someone overcomes the age-old DNA template and does something unexpected. It’s difficult to divert your eyes when it’s something new, something that deviates from the norm.

A hot, faltered breath – out.

I wish I could see the truth. It’s easier said than done when you’re lying to yourself. When the falsehoods are that which never wavers, the tension alone will cause the words to break. But when verities are all you ever know, you do not really know them; we must see what is fake to see what is real. Where the game ends and the pain begins, nobody’s ever quite sure.

Nails dug into the palm of his free hand, and fingertips lingered over metal for just one second too long.